Hair Jiggle

stringtheory9

One of the production decisions I have made for my project is to use mesh hair. So I wanted to find a quick way to give the mesh hair a little life without having to keyframe a bunch of movement morphs. After running into a few dead ends I tried using Sparrowhawke3D's excellent Jiggle deformer plugin. My initial tests so far have been very promising.

The plugin give us a lot of control over most of the dynamics needed to model basic hair momentum movement. I have just started playing around with multiple jiggle deformers on the same hair mesh and so far have not run into any problems. I haven't tried but I don't believe that the weight mapping tab can be used due to the nature of the way hair meshes works. This is not a problem because the inclusion zones seem to be better suited to this use.

Below is a render of the first test I did last night. I haven't started tweaking settings yet so this is using the default values with the dampening turned down a little. There is only one jiggle deformer on this test. In the wireframe, the blue sphere is the inclusion zone and the white X is the target helper serving as the mass target. The deformer plugin is added under the hair mesh modifier tab.

Have fun!

Higher quality YouTube version

WendyLuvsCatz

What a great idea.

Dartanbeck

I was wondering (a while ago) if that would work well. Very cool to see your test. I'll have to give it a shot. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, I have spent many hours trying to get a similar hairstyle to the one you're demonstrating using Carrara strand-based hair, and have got nothing but frustration when it came to working with my character's movements. So I've just recently (once again) decided to go back to my mesh hair. I'm currently using four copies of the same hair figure with a bunch of morphs that I've made for it, and altering each layer to fit over each other in layers. I think that it could give some pretty cool results using this jiggle deformation.

evilproducer

Nice idea. I haven't tried it with vertex hair before due to the initial complication of setting it up. I have used the oscillate tweener with dampening to good effect though.

stringtheory9

Dartanbeck said:

I was wondering (a while ago) if that would work well. Very cool to see your test. I'll have to give it a shot. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, I have spent many hours trying to get a similar hairstyle to the one you're demonstrating using Carrara strand-based hair, and have got nothing but frustration when it came to working with my character's movements. So I've just recently (once again) decided to go back to my mesh hair. I'm currently using four copies of the same hair figure with a bunch of morphs that I've made for it, and altering each layer to fit over each other in layers. I think that it could give some pretty cool results using this jiggle deformation.

 I had the same experiance. I'm amazed at some of the styles that exists for dynamic hair and I often marvel at the patience the creators must have to get it to that point. Sparrowhawke3D has what I think is a newish plugin called Thicken. I'm not sure if it's looking to solve the same thing as your layering but it was built to layer mesh hair. It might be a time saver.

stringtheory9

evilproducer said:

Nice idea. I haven't tried it with vertex hair before due to the initial complication of setting it up. I have used the oscillate tweener with dampening to good effect though. 

An oscillating tweener is pretty slick too!  

Salem2007

What is the differance between "mesh hair" and "vertex hair"? 

Great idea, by the way....

evilproducer

They're the same.